


putting up your armor

by shineyma



Series: protect the flames [2]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, F/M, Season/Series 02
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-08
Updated: 2017-04-08
Packaged: 2018-10-16 12:35:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,553
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10571436
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shineyma/pseuds/shineyma
Summary: Jemma doesn't know how she forgot.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I did a meme on tumblr to celebrate 1k followers, and ilosttrackofthings asked for more in the same verse as [(your hands) protect the flames](http://archiveofourown.org/works/8083546). It was supposed to be a drabble, but...*shrugs*
> 
> I am so, so far behind on comment replies. I'm so sorry! I'm awful. I would say I'll get to them this weekend, except I have a 15 page paper due tomorrow that I haven't started, so.......probably not. Oops.
> 
> Thanks for reading and, as always, please be gentle if you review! <3

It’s been hours since Olivia fell asleep, but Jemma still makes no move to set her down. Instead she continues to cradle her daughter to her shoulder, swaying back and forth and trying her absolute hardest to pretend they’re the only two people in the world.

But, of course, they’re not.

“Are you coming to bed?”

Grant’s voice is low, which is to be expected when Olivia’s asleep, but it’s also tentative, which is decidedly not. The last time she heard him _tentative_ was…she doesn’t even know. During their time on the Bus, certainly. When he was that other man, the cover. Before he showed himself to be traitorous and cruel and violent.

Before she was a prisoner.

“Jemma.”

Her cheek throbs. It’s beginning to swell, puffing up beneath the redness that she suspects will become a terrible bruise. The man who struck her is very, very dead, but the evidence remains—and so, too, does her new awareness.

“It’s funny,” she says, more to the window than to Grant. He’s behind her, sitting on the edge of the bed. Waiting for her to join him. “I’d actually almost managed to forget.”

Olivia stirs against her shoulder, perfect little hands opening and closing around nothing. She doesn’t wake. The bedsprings creak.

“Forget what?” Grant asks.

“That I don’t want to be here.” There’s a burn in her throat: not quite tears, but not quite bile, either. She’s unsettled, uncomfortable in her own skin—in her own room. And that’s made all the more terrible by how uncomfortable she _hasn’t_ been, these past few months. “That you’re keeping me against my will and threatening my daughter.”

In the silence of their room, Grant’s swallow is audible. “I would never do anything to hurt Olivia. Never.”

“But you don’t deny I’m a prisoner here.”

The accusation hangs between them, heavy and sad.

Jemma remembers, with perfect clarity, fighting Grant. For months she fought him—punching, clawing, scratching, even _biting_ , anything she could do to cause him pain. Every time she tried to escape, HYDRA would call him in, and she would fight him, and she would lose. He would comfort her, she would hate him, he would leave. It was a horrible, violent cycle they were stuck in.

And then HYDRA found out about her pregnancy. They called Grant. She fought. She lost. He comforted her.

But instead of leaving, he stayed. He named himself Olivia’s father, protected Jemma from the abortion she knows HYDRA would have forced on her the moment her condition became inconvenient. They spent months playing happy family, and somewhere along the line—somewhere between the quinjet flight to this base and the morning Olivia was born—she forgot to hate him.

“Look, what happened today…” Grant stops to breathe in deeply. Hesitance has been replaced by the sharp edge of fury; he’s struggling with his temper again, as he did all afternoon. “It’s not gonna happen again. I promise.”

Her own fury rises up. The urge to shout comes with it, but her daughter is sleeping peacefully and shouldn’t be disturbed.

Instead, she calms herself in Olivia: the weight of her, the tiny breaths feathering against her shoulder, the soft, wispy hairs beneath her fingers. Her daughter is small and precious and perfect, everything she could’ve dreamed before she became trapped in this nightmare.

Except it hasn’t been a nightmare, and that’s the whole problem. She let herself get caught up in all of this, in the beauty of her daughter, in the comfort of these quarters and the kindness of Grant’s touch.

“All the promises in the world don’t change the fact that I’m a prisoner,” she says. “Or that…”

She bites her tongue before she finishes the thought, but it lingers there behind her teeth, waiting to be voiced: or that he isn’t her husband or her boyfriend or even really the father of her daughter. He’s her _warden_.

Her warden who’s chosen to turn them into a family— _chosen_ , because he has that luxury. He has all the choice in the world, while she has none at all.

She doesn’t know how she forgot.

“Jemma—”

“Do you know what he said to me?” she asks. Though she keeps her voice quiet, her tone is enough to have Olivia stirring, sweet face scrunching unhappily. “Did you hear it?”

The bedsprings creak again, and this time the cause is revealed when Grant’s arms wrap around her waist. He pulls her back into his chest, surrounding her in a way that would comfort her on any other night.

When did his strength stop feeling like a threat?

“I only saw him hit you,” he says, voice no less deadly for its softness. “What did he say, sweetheart?”

She closes her eyes, remembering anew the events of the afternoon. The man who struck her is dead now—he and two of his friends, who tried foolishly to avenge him—but her skin hasn’t yet stopped crawling.

“He groped me.” Grant stills. “He groped me and then propositioned me, and when I told him off for it, he laughed in my face and said—”

Her voice sticks in her throat. Grant’s lips find her temple, then her cheek, and then her shoulder, and that’s where they stay. Against her other shoulder, Olivia is making the soft almost-squeak that means she’ll be waking soon, wanting feeding.

In this moment, in this room, she’s as safe as she’s ever been within HYDRA’s walls. And yet still her blood is like ice in her veins.

Grant’s stubble scrapes her skin as he shifts to rest his chin on her shoulder instead.

“Said?” he prompts.

_Just because Ward’s been keeping you as his personal whore doesn’t make you any less company property_. The words ring in her ears, ugly and mean and all the worse for the truth in them.

Suddenly, she can’t bear to voice them. Not with her daughter in her arms.

“He called me company property,” she says instead. “ _Property_. As if I were a chair or a gun or—”

“You’re not,” Grant interrupts sharply. His arms have tightened around her waist, nearly to the point of discomfort. “You—”

She expects him to argue the point—he’s given to claiming she’s a prisoner only at her own insistence—but he cuts himself off with a sigh before he’s ever really begun. Whether he’s finally realized that it’s not true (as though she could ever claim loyalty to HYDRA and be _believed_ after all the fuss she made back at that other base, before her pregnancy was revealed and she had more than her own life to worry about) or if he simply doesn’t feel like arguing about it again, she couldn’t say.

Either way, he moves the conversation along. “Why did he hit you?”

“Because I told him that property or not, I was still more valuable than he.” She can’t help smiling to herself, for all that it makes her face throb. “He didn’t appreciate that.”

Grant huffs a laugh. “I bet.”

He straightens on another sigh, lifting his chin from her shoulder. One arm remains around her waist; the other comes up that he might rest his hand over hers on Olivia’s back. His timing is perfect—even as he moves, Olivia is waking, wiggling against Jemma’s shoulder and beginning to whine, but the touch of Grant’s hand silences her.

Olivia is young—too young to understand the situation, too young to care what a father _is_ , let alone whether Grant is actually hers…or at least that’s what Jemma tells herself. It’s hard to believe, however, hard to deny the happy _ahh_ ing noise she makes when Jemma readjusts her, moving her so she can see Grant over Jemma’s shoulder.

She knows Grant’s face as well as she knows Jemma’s, greets him with sounds otherwise saved for her mother. Olivia’s world is small, but she knows and recognizes her parents, is happy to see them and cries endlessly when left in HYDRA’s daycare.

“Hi, Livvy,” Grant croons, leaning in close. “Did you sleep well?”

Olivia coos happily in return.

It doesn’t matter to Olivia that Jemma is a prisoner—that Jemma does terrible things in the name of keeping her safe. It doesn’t matter that Jemma’s being held against her will or that she misses Fitz and the others so much she physically aches with it some days.

“Here,” Grant says, and then he’s lifting Olivia from her arms, settling her against his own shoulder with ease. Jemma feels cold at the loss. “Mommy’s been holding you for hours. I bet her arms are tired. Why don’t we give her a little break?”

It would matter if they left, though. If any of Jemma’s dreams of escape—set aside for months now, and she doesn’t quite remember when or how that happened—came true, if they made it away and safely back to whatever remains of SHIELD…

If they left Grant behind, Olivia would be devastated. Old enough to miss him, too young to understand why she shouldn’t.

A kiss brushes against her temple. “She needs a change. I’ll take care of it. You should sit down, ice that bruise again.”

Jemma knows precisely why she shouldn’t miss him.

It makes her certainty that she _would_ all the worse.


End file.
